A Trio of Triumphs (best title I could think of for this post)

I am so bad at keeping this blog up to date...

The past few weeks have been a little bit of a blur of routine, but interspersed with some really great experiences.

I've been helping with the King David Southwick Campus musical, as "Assistant Director", which is what the head teacher calls me, although I basically just help keep the kids under control and give the occasional bit of choreographical assistance (yes I made that word up). It's been a lot of fun, and the show is tomorrow night, so it will be really nice to see how it goes- although the teachers were still instructing the kids during the last rehearsal...

Update: it went well.

Oh hey who's that at number 2 on the programme?

I also had a night out with my uncle Ben, going to the Melbourne Noodle Night Market and my first ever cocktail bar. The noodle market was awesome- dozens of stalls selling small "asian" things that were really asian-inspired food made more fashionable. You could try loads of different things as they were all so small, so we completely stuffed ourselves and then headed to the Crème brûlée stall that had really cool flavours and a massive crowd in front. I got a chai and chocolate flavoured one. After all that fun we went to a cocktail bar. To get there you had to go down this completely random dingy little alley-way like in films and you had to knock on the door and ask for Charlie... no I'm kidding, but we did go down a really creepy alley and the door was only slightly better-looking than all the other doors in the alley. Inside it was super cool- it was dimly lit, all the waiters had on 20s-style clothes, and they were playing jazz music, like in a speak-easy. Ben and I both got this cocktail that tasted like a hug, warm and full of cinnamon. It tasted like you needed a bath robe and swivelling arm-chair to properly enjoy it. Here is a picture of me pretending the cinnamon stick was a cigar (to get into character): 

I also went to a show called "Opera and the Bowl" with some family, and it was excellent. It was held at the Melbourne bowl which is huge- there were a few thousand people there I would guess, and we got seats right at the very front! Here's a picture to give you an idea of how lucky we were:

The concert consisted of performances by four very ostentatious opera singers (do you like my alliteration?), a choir, and a full orchestra. They sang lots of great opera pieces, my favourite was that one from Carmen- you know, the one that was in that old Simpson's episode?

Ok that's all I can remember for now and anyway it's very late so I must retire to my bedchamber! I'll do another post if I remember more :)

The Grampians

So a few days [edit: about a week- sorry!] ago I got back from an amazing mini-holiday. We had a long weekend here, because there was a public holiday because of - wait for it - a horse race. Almost as good a reason for a holiday as the football match about a month ago.

Anyway, the long weekend was great because I got to go to the Grampian Mountains with my cousin Avi, my aunt Cari, one of my violin students- Anna, and Anna's family. I haven't seen very much wildlife this trip, so it was very refreshing and made me feel more at home in this land, I think because almost every time I've been here in the past, we've gone camping (like the time we travelled around for 4 months).

The best thing to do in the Grampians is go hiking, which is what we did. On day 2 we did a 2k hike up a mountain, and all of it was on an incline of about 50 degrees, and I thought it was a lot of fun. When we got to the top Avi just sat down and cried. When I asked him what was wrong he said "It was just so BORing!" Sorry about that Avicado... (a bit of cake cheered him up pretty quickly though). We also went to a bunch of lookouts and took lots of pictures, some of which I've put on Facebook.

Some photos from when Anna and I took posey pics of each other at a lookout. (The socks and sandals was intentional).

We weren't camping though- we stayed in a motel that was very nice, except I kept hearing quite a loud noise in our room, so I decided that in order to get some sleep, I'd take my blanket and rough it in the bathroom for the night. After that I felt that I had had my share of camping for the trip.

We also did lots of shopping in the Halls Gap town, and Anna bought some Beanboozled jelly beans, which we had lots of fun with during the hikes (feel free to pay me Jelly Belly), however there's probably lots of half-chewed jelly beans on a few of the mountains.

So that was my weekend in the Grampians. It was a lot of fun and I hope I can see more Australian bush this year at some point.

Afterthought: I've been thinking of writing a Roald Dahl-style book about snobby private school girls who are called things like Influenza, Diptheria, and Eczema (get it, because they're sickening?) I think it would be funny, because diseases ending in -a make quite good posh-girl names.